digital marketing

Mostly everyone thinks of marketing as the business of promoting and selling products or services.

Marketers commonly refer to a “pyramid” to describe the way they attract new prospects and convert them into customers.

What Do We Mean By Pyramid?

Traditionally, we’ve prioritized our limited resources and time on trying to find and convert new prospects (the top of the pyramid).Keeping those hard-earned customers (the bottom of the pyramid) has often been an afterthought.

That’s because, until recently, there was little we could do to keep existing customers that was drastically different from the tactics used to attract new ones.

Historically, the best you could do after turning a prospect into a customer was to provide a great customer experience and just hope they come back to buy more—and bring their friends with them.

But technology, namely social media and email, has changed the game.

Social Media Marketing:

But in case of social media marketing what we do is the reverse the reversing the pyramid .

Social Media Marketing is about recognizing that your existing customers are your best assets.And technology now enables us to influence consumer behavior both before and after the sale.

With low-cost and easy-to-use tools like social media and email, you no longer have to hope that customers come back and bring their friends with them.Now you can reach out to your existing customers to remind them to come back, and make word-of-mouth as easy as clicking the share, like, or tweet buttons.

Bottom line: successful businesses understand that marketing does not end with the sale, but rather it begins after the first sale (the bottom of the traditional sales pyramid).

Social Media is an Important Part of Your Marketing Mix, but Not the Only One:

Social media marketing is not a replacement for other marketing tactics and we highly recommend that you continue to do what has worked for you in the past.

Traditional marketing activities that still work for you, like advertising in a newspaper, sending direct mail and attending networking events, are still essential.

However, for most, social media marketing is now a critical component of an effective marketing strategy.

In fact, social media marketing works best when combined with other marketing activities especially email marketing.

Now that you are up and running on Facebook, we have something to tell you… not everything you post will get seen by all of your fans. We know, we know. How could that be? Well Facebook does their best to make sure its users aren’t overwhelmed by messages they don’t want. In this section we’ll show you how this works and what you can do about it with News Feed Optimization (NFO).

While NFO doesn’t necessarily sound like the most powerful marketing tool in your arsenal… trust us, you’ll start to appreciate its power soon.

We’re going to show you data from BrandGlue, a company that helps brands reach more eyeballs by ranking higher in the newsfeed algorithm using NFO. They’ve helped a lot of businesses, including Intel, icanhascheezburger Networks/Fail Blog/LOLCats, Microsoft, Mint.com, the Washington Redskins, and Kiva.

In reality though, research shows that 96% of fans never even revisit fan pages once they’ve “liked” them. That means that in most cases your fans see your posts in the personal newsfeeds and decide whether to “like” it, comment on it, share it, or do nothing right in their newsfeed, not on your Facebook Page.Fans won’t treat your Facebook Page like a website they visit and read, instead they’ll interact with it if you’re doing the right things.Content that attracts your fans’ attention in their newsfeed is the holy grail.

Effective Facebook strategies focus on content that looks compelling in a user’s newsfeed to generate likes, comments, and shares.

The Facebook Algorithm

What is the Facebook Newsfeed Algorithm?

We’re not going to get into all of the details, but what you need to know is:

Facebook didn’t want to crowd your newsfeed, so they created an algorithm that hides content it thinks you might skip anyway.

That means that just because you post something to your fans, it doesn’t mean they’ll all see it.

Unfortunately, average fan Pages rank low in the algorithm so that 50-70% of fans never see the content in their newsfeed.

You need to focus on driving the actions that impact NFO “like” impressions, likes, and comments.

Impressions Are Your Best Friend

Lots of people look at Facebook Insights and get confused about why their total impressions are higher than their total number of fans. Total impressions are a count of everything, but what you should really care about is unique impressions -how many different people you reach, not how many times you reach one person. And how many impressions you get are what measures how often you show up in fans newsfeeds.

If you want to rank extra high in the algorithm, you might want to hire an NFO agency (such as BrandGlue). It’s similar to SEO, except it’s for the Facebook newsfeed. And it’s very effective at reaching more eyeballs.

A few short years ago, marketers called social media the free marketing format. The reality is that, while some social media marketing platforms may be free to use, they were NEVER free since they required employee effort and other resources.

Instead marketers should measure improved return on each marketing dollar invested in social media. This requires tracked all resources used including employee time (across departments), special services and outsources support. 51% of marketers benefit from social media marketing to reduce marketing expense.

This means that marketers must become better at capitalizing on each social media interaction. Think beyond vanity metrics such as likes to engagement and hand raisers.

Change your thinking from increased interaction to more effective interaction, even if this means additional resources are needed for better quality content or supporting social media advertising.

Actionable Social Media Marketing Tips:

Track your full breadth of social media activities. This means employee time (across disciplines such as marketing, creative and technology), resources and outsourced support.

Create more effective and reliable metrics to track your social media investment. Work with your finance / analytics team. With regard to expenses, this means return on social media investment and sales and leads attributable to social media.

Augment your social media optimization interaction with social media marketing. Many platforms are starting to test and rollout advertising products. As a result, your natural social media traffic and reach will get eroded. Therefore add a small budget to test advertising.